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How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

José Urbina López Primary School
sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school
serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is
a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and
it’s not uncommon for locals to find bodies scattered in the street in
the morning. To get to the school, students walk along a white dirt road
that parallels a fetid canal. On a recent morning there was a 1940s-era
tractor, a decaying boat in a ditch, and a herd of goats nibbling gray
strands of grass. A cinder-block barrier separates the school from a
wasteland—the far end of which is a mound of trash that grew so big, it
was finally closed down. On most days, a rotten smell drifts through the
cement-walled classrooms. Some people here call the school un lugar de
castigo—”a place of punishment.”

For 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno, it was a bright spot. More than
25 years ago, her family moved to the border from central Mexico in
search of a better life. Instead, they got stuck living beside the dump.
Her father spent all day scavenging for scrap, digging for pieces of
aluminum, glass, and plastic in the muck. Recently, he had developed
nosebleeds, but he didn’t want Paloma to worry. She was his little
angel—the youngest of eight children.

After school, Paloma would come home and sit with her father in the
main room of their cement-and-wood home. Her father was a
weather-beaten, gaunt man who always wore a cowboy hat. Paloma would
recite the day’s lessons for him in her crisp uniform—gray polo,
blue-and-white skirt—and try to cheer him up. She had long black hair, a
high forehead, and a thoughtful, measured way of talking. School had
never been challenging for her. She sat in rows with the other students
while teachers told the kids what they needed to know. It wasn’t hard to
repeat it back, and she got good grades without thinking too much. As
she headed into fifth grade, she assumed she was in for more of the
same—lectures, memorization, and busy work.

Sergio Juárez Correa was used to teaching that kind of class. For
five years, he had stood in front of students and worked his way through
the government-mandated curriculum. It was mind-numbingly boring for
him and the students, and he’d come to the conclusion that it was a
waste of time. Test scores were poor, and even the students who did well
weren’t truly engaged. Something had to change.

He too had grown up beside a garbage dump in Matamoros, and he had
become a teacher to help kids learn enough to make something more of
their lives. So in 2011—when Paloma entered his class—Juárez Correa
decided to start experimenting. He began reading books and searching for
ideas online. Soon he stumbled on a video describing the work of Sugata
Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in
the UK. In the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, Mitra conducted
experiments in which he gave children in India access to computers.
Without any instruction, they were able to teach themselves a surprising
variety of things, from DNA replication to English.

Juárez Correa didn’t know it yet, but he had happened on an emerging
educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to
the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite
information has changed how we communicate, process information, and
think. Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile
than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent
thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy.

And yet the dominant model of public education is still fundamentally
rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces
valued punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence above all else.
(In 1899, William T. Harris, the US commissioner of education,
celebrated the fact that US schools had developed the “appearance of a
machine,” one that teaches the student “to behave in an orderly manner,
to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.”) We don’t
openly profess those values nowadays, but our educational system—which
routinely tests kids on their ability to recall information and
demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills—doubles down on the view
that students are material to be processed, programmed, and
quality-tested. School administrators prepare curriculum standards and
“pacing guides” that tell teachers what to teach each day. Legions of
managers supervise everything that happens in the classroom; in 2010
only 50 percent of public school staff members in the US were teachers.

The results speak for themselves: Hundreds of thousands of kids drop
out of public high school every year. Of those who do graduate from high
school, almost a third are “not prepared academically for first-year
college courses,” according to a 2013 report from the testing service
ACT. The World Economic Forum ranks the US just 49th out of 148
developed and developing nations in quality of math and science
instruction. “The fundamental basis of the system is fatally flawed,”
says Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford and
founding director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s
Future. “In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were
the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three
skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal
skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.”

That’s why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the
Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing
radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them,
knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but
something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled
exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step
aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are
creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a
generation of geniuses in the process.

At home in Matamoros, Juárez Correa found himself utterly absorbed by
these ideas. And the more he learned, the more excited he became. On
August 21, 2011—the start of the school year — he walked into his
classroom and pulled the battered wooden desks into small groups. When
Paloma and the other students filed in, they looked confused. Juárez
Correa invited them to take a seat and then sat down with them.

He started by telling them that there were kids in other parts of the
world who could memorize pi to hundreds of decimal points. They could
write symphonies and build robots and airplanes. Most people wouldn’t
think that the students at José Urbina López could do those kinds of
things. Kids just across the border in Brownsville, Texas, had laptops,
high-speed Internet, and tutoring, while in Matamoros the students had
intermittent electricity, few computers, limited Internet, and sometimes
not enough to eat.

“But you do have one thing that makes you the equal of any kid in the world,” Juárez Correa said. “Potential.”

He looked around the room. “And from now on,” he told them, “we’re
going to use that potential to make you the best students in the world.”

Paloma was silent, waiting to be told what to do. She didn’t realize
that over the next nine months, her experience of school would be
rewritten, tapping into an array of educational innovations from around
the world and vaulting her and some of her classmates to the top of the
math and language rankings in Mexico.

“So,” Juárez Correa said, “what do you want to learn?”

In 1999, Sugata Mitra was chief scientist at a company in New Delhi
that trains software developers. His office was on the edge of a slum,
and on a hunch one day, he decided to put a computer into a nook in a
wall separating his building from the slum. He was curious to see what
the kids would do, particularly if he said nothing. He simply powered
the computer on and watched from a distance. To his surprise, the
children quickly figured out how to use the machine.

Over the years, Mitra got more ambitious. For a study published in
2010, he loaded a computer with molecular biology materials and set it
up in Kalikuppam, a village in southern India. He selected a small group
of 10- to 14-year-olds and told them there was some interesting stuff
on the computer, and might they take a look? Then he applied his new
pedagogical method: He said no more and left.

Over the next 75 days, the children worked out how to use the
computer and began to learn. When Mitra returned, he administered a
written test on molecular biology. The kids answered about one of four
questions correctly. After another 75 days, with the encouragement of a
friendly local, they were getting every other question right. “If you
put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult
restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees
around a flower.”

A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling
in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED,
the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process
of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in
the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There
will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six
or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining
principle: “The children are completely in charge.”

“The bottom line is, if you’re not the one controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well.”

Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of
learning that wasn’t possible before. The exterior of his schools will
be mostly glass, so outsiders can peer in. Inside, students will gather
in groups around computers and research topics that interest them. He
has also recruited a group of retired British teachers who will appear
occasionally on large wall screens via Skype, encouraging students to
investigate their ideas—a process Mitra believes best fosters learning.
He calls them the Granny Cloud. “They’ll be life-size, on two walls”
Mitra says. “And the children can always turn them off.”

Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to
Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and
Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and
following their curiosity. Einstein spent a year at a
Pestalozzi-inspired school in the mid-1890s, and he later credited it
with giving him the freedom to begin his first thought experiments on
the theory of relativity. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
similarly claim that their Montessori schooling imbued them with a
spirit of independence and creativity.

In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories
with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain
activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. The screen
was blurred out except for a small, movable square through which
subjects could glimpse objects laid out on a grid. Half the time, the
subjects controlled the square window, allowing them to determine the
pace at which they examined the objects; the rest of the time, they
watched a replay of someone else moving the window. The study found that
when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited
more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain
involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their
ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one
who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,”
says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern
University.

In 2009, scientists from the University of Louisville and MIT’s
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences conducted a study of 48
children between the ages of 3 and 6. The kids were presented with a toy
that could squeak, play notes, and reflect images, among other things.
For one set of children, a researcher demonstrated a single attribute
and then let them play with the toy. Another set of students was given
no information about the toy. This group played longer and discovered an
average of six attributes of the toy; the group that was told what to
do discovered only about four. A similar study at UC Berkeley
demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to
come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new,
but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says
coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial
intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it
can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines
that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes,
the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle
applies to children, she says.

A Brief History of Alternative Schools

Alternative Schools, a
History · New research shows what educators have long intuited: Letting
kids pursue their own interests sharpens their hunger for knowledge.
Here’s a look back at this approach. —Jason Kehe

470BC | Socrates
is born in Athens. He goes on to become a long-haired teacher who
famously let students arrive at their own conclusions. His questioning,
probing approach — the Socratic method—endures to this day.

1907 | Maria Montessori
opens her first Children’s House in Rome, where kids are encouraged to
play and teach themselves. Americans later visit her schools and see the
Montessori method in action. It spreads worldwide.

1919 | The first Waldorf school opens in Stuttgart, Germany. Based on the ideas of philosopher Rudolf Steiner, it encourages self-motivated learning. Today, there are more than 1,000 Waldorf schools in 60 countries.

1921 | A. S. Neill
Founds the Summerhill School, where kids have the “freedom to go to
lessons or stay away, freedom to play for days … or years if necessary.”
Eventually, such democratic schools appear around the world.

1945 | Loris Malaguzzi volunteers to teach in a school that parents are building in a war-torn Italian village outside Reggio Emilia. The Reggio Emilia approach—a community of self-guided learning—is born.

1967 | Seymour Papert,
a protégé of child psychologist Jean Piaget, helps create the first
version of Logo, a programming language kids can use to teach
themselves. He becomes a lifelong advocate for technology’s role in
learning.

1999 | Sugata Mitra
conducts his first “hole in the wall” experiment in New Delhi, India.
On their own, slum kids teach themselves to use a computer. Mitra dubs
his approach minimally invasive education.

2006 | Ken Robinson gives what will become the most frequently viewed TED Talk ever: “How Schools Kill Creativity.” Students should be free to make mistakes and pursue their own creative interests, Robinson argues.

There's a whole second page of this article if you click the link at the top! :) What do you think of this idea? Do you think it could be implimented here? Pros/cons, etc...?

To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.

I didn't read the entire thing. Still, I don't know if I like this at all. I limit technology in my house. TV is limited and he's not allowed to play with our phones or computers. I think it's done horrible things to society as far as socialization and imagination go. I hate how kids can't play anymore.

I will have to admit that when DS becomes obsessed with a topic, right now it's tractors, we will find YouTube videos for him to watch on it. His play becomes a lot more realistic afteward. When he was going through his planes phase we watched videos of them and he discovered the fire fighting planes that drop water. Became obsessed with dropping water on fire with his planes after that. So yeah, it teaches them, can't deny it.

Send me email updates about messages I've received on the site and the latest news from The CafeMom Team.
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